... try and find us

Living in the Rocky Mountains, we enjoy frequent wildlife sightings.  We like to be able to identify the critters we see.  Sometimes, this is easy... A mountain goat: A big-horned sheep: But...  What are these? Could they be goats or perhaps sheep?   They are not mountain goats or big-horned sheep.  Or are they?? Fortunately for us, Parks Canada have made a great video to clear up any confusion!  Click here .   So now when we see these critters we can sing out 'Look at those sheep!' And a little tidbit!  Mountain goats are actually members of the antelope family.  Their scientific name Oreamnos americanus   means 'mountain lamb belonging to America'.

This, from Lizzie Rummel , a biography by Ruth Oltmann . In the Canadian Rocky Mountains it is a tradition when there is no solution to a problem, or the burdens of the day are just too much to handle, "Let's have a cuppa tea" somehow changes the look of even the worst problems. Mary Conway exemplified this when she wrote in the Alpine Club of Canada Journal in 1948: A tea tent is certainly a morale booster in any camp and I can only weep for my lost youth in the 'States where I was unaware that such refinements existed. Aside from its merits as a beverage, tea has a unique psychological value. How many parties would have been stranded high in the mountain vastness had not the prospect of tea called forth superhuman feats of effort and skill! How many little tidbits of gossip would have died an undernourished death had not the tea tent provided an audience. If I learned nothing else from my stay in Canada, I am forever grateful that I learned to appreciate th...

The longer I live in my newly adopted mountain village, the more interesting bits of its history I learn. Yesterday I did a mountain bike cruise along the Powerline Trail and travelled through the unfinished Three Sisters Golf Course.  It is a project that started in the 1980's and has been owned by several companies - many of whom have gone bankrupt.  As I rode through the wide open spaces that had been cleared of trees, I passed stands of deer and elk grazing on the exposed grassland.  A stream wound its way down the hillside and into a beautiful manmade reservoir before continuing down to the Bow River. It prompted me to do some research when I returned home.  I found a video about the area that was curated by Jerry Stephenson, a long-time local that was the chief engineer at the Canmore Mines until their permanent closing in 1979. Click here to watch the Video! It warns of the danger of developing the land there any further than light recreational (...

How COVID-19 entered our world and broke our hearts I come from a very close family, scattered around Australia and Canada but close nonetheless. We are an active family, into skiing, sailing, riding horses and other such pursuits.  And we are travellers.  In part because we live scattered across two countries but also due to all the many great adventures to be had and our very strong sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). Much of this stems from our father.  Dad didn’t think twice about lifting his tiny girls atop towering horses with a ‘hold on, she’ll stop at the fence’ or of piling us onto his sailing boat and heading across the open waters of Bass Strait to Deal Island.  We went on Bunyip hunts at night, searching for that elusive, mythical creature and he both thrilled and terrified us with tales of man-eating tigers as bedtime stories. It was Dad leading the charge on grand adventures, hosting epic parties and living life to the full.  When he ...

There are many beautiful places in the world.  This is one of them. As part of our year of staying (sort of) in Canada, we are venturing into a few of the places close-by that we have been meaning to get to for forever.  Many, many times we have driven by the turnoff on Highway 1 that leads to Lake O'Hara.  The parking lot twelve kilometres past Lake Louise is as far as anyone can get in a private vehicle.  This being winter, we donned cross-country skis as well as backpacks for the eleven kilometre trek into the lake. The out-and-back route - click for a bigger view. Starting with some uphill ... ... and more ... We only decided to make the trip in a month prior.  Some friends from the running group (Pamela, Grace and Jim), joined us on a Tuesday morning at the trailhead at 11 am.  The fire road is undulating uphill with a solitary picnic bench just past the 5 km marker.  The trail twists and turns through the valley south of M...

The move to Canmore means that some of our closest neighbours live on the Morley Reserve and are members of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations .  Taking advantage of the wonderful resource that it ArtsPlace, we enrolled in a 10 week Stoney Nakoda Language and Culture course. The course is run by Buddy Wesley who is one of the knowledge keepers of the Wesley Band from Morley.  Stoney Nakoda is an oral language spoken by around 3000 people in Alberta.  In recent years, a writing system has been developed with an alphabet and a series of rhyming syllables.  Unlike English, these are always pronounced the same way. Vowels are pronounced: a as in father e as in cafe i as in ski o as in go u as in blue â, î, û - nasalized But the huge challenge is that no structure for learning the language has been developed.  There are no verb conjunctions, dictionaries or spelling protocols.  It is rather fun to start to recognise words that we are familiar with a...

When you live in Canmore, it is easy to focus on physical activity.  Cycling, downhill and cross-country skiing, climbing, hiking, running, canoeing ... the daylight seems to vanish from underneath us.  Winter brings colder temperatures and shorter bouts of sunshine, so we do find ourselves indoors and looking to fend off cabin fever. As well as being a town full of active people, love of (and occupancy in) the mountains also inspires artistic endeavours.  There are many artists in our little berg and therefore the arts community is unusually strong.  We have no less than three theatre companies; there are more public and private galleries than you can shake a hiking pole at; the Bow Valley hosts the Banff Centre for Arts; there are world-class festivals for music, spoken word, painting, sculpture and written word.  Heck, we even have a former potter as a mayor.  One of the outcomes of this is we have a fabulous community gathering centre called artsPla...

Storytelling is an artform I've always wished I was better at.  We have just returned from Pecha Kucha Night at Artspace and I have been dazzled by the stories I've just heard.  Pecha Kucha is a form of storytelling where you have twenty photos (or slides) that you use as visual aids.  Each slide is presented for twenty seconds, one after the other, and you have to speak to the group as they appear.  You can't pause the forward march of the pictures, nor can you jump ahead to the next one if you can't speak to one for the full twenty seconds.  At a Pecha Kucha event, there are usually six to eight presenters and they have all been given a theme to present on. Tonight's theme was "What If ...".  One of the tales was from a woman in her mid-twenties who had been abruptly dumped out of a relationship in which her partner had convinced her to move to Canmore with him, even though she knew no one in the town or what she was going to do for employment....

Well that was chilly!  What a great cure for jetlag - run 5km in -12°C! Jumping straight back into it with a Monday night Run Club run.

Winter in these parts is the season when the rain falls and the crops grow.  Spring is when the crops are harvested, hay is cut and the livestock is chubby.  Except when the region is in drought. And this is what drought looks like... Topsoil blowing in the wind turning the clouds pink This drought in NSW started in 2017. This year is the third growing season in drought conditions.  This does not just affect the farmers but also the business owners in the towns, the price of grains and meat in the supermarkets and even Australia's trade balance. This crop should be long and green and almost ready to harvest Australia is no stranger to drought, it is dealt with in our folklore and our most famous poem (My Country by Dorothea Mackellar - see bottom of post) but it is always devastating to witness. Pasture?  How can a sheep get fat on that? The other joy of being in the drought-affected West are the blowies.  Don't fall over in horror...

Since watching the movie 'The Dish" , Sean has wanted to visit so with some time on our hands and the use of Craig's fully tricked-out Hilux, we headed west almost 400km to Parkes. The Dish is more correctly known as CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Parkes radio telescope. It is a 64m diameter parabolic dish used for radio astronomy. Basically it detects radio waves from objects in space and with some rather clever processing, turns these into images of the objects. CSIRO"S Parkes radio telescope At times, it is also contracted to NASA and ESA to receive signals from their space craft - Mariner II, IV, Apollo 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, Voyager II, Galileo, Giotto, Huygens...  It was the 1969 Apollo 11 mission with Parkes the prime receiving station, that is the subject of the movie. Although it did deviate from reality just a wee little bit. It moved to its 'stowed' position when we were there as the winds  w...

Eulogy to a Yellow Dinghy After 10,000 nautical miles together and many grand adventures, we bid farewell to The Yellow Dinghy.  Her time had come.  Her slow leaks that required re-inflating each day had developed into terminal perforations, requiring a re-inflate every hour.  We took her to the dinghy repair place and the prognosis was not good.  Her glue is failing, her seams are no longer airtight; she is simply too unsafe. Oh faithful yellow rubber run-about, you took us to the shore through calm and storm.  Onshore, left unattended, you entertained gaggles of squealing children of many nationalities ... some who had never seen a boat made of anything but wood. Hours of fun for Indonesian Children! You helped us cart hundreds of litres of diesel and diesel-like fluid (measured in Indo-litres) back to Popeye to help us carry on through the tropics.  You bounced along happily behind Popeye across the tropics and the equator (!!!), waiting to s...